“Yes, the pantheon of truly transformative, not merely excellent, painters is almost all white, and it most certainly is almost all male. But the best critique of this reality is a parallel reality equally as energetic.

“I suspect every ambitious artist wants to do more than passably good work.

“The value of what we produce is determined by comparison with and in contrast to what our fellow citizens find engaging.

“As it happens, one is either leading or following, and if you are following, then you are behind and therefore vulnerable to the, rightfully, self-serving interests of others.”

Kerry James Marshall, “Shall I Compare Thee…?”, pp. 71-79, in KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: Mastry, edited by Helen Molesworth, New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2016.

• Painting for my first grandchild in progress

It is indeed easy to love those to whom we are closely related. However more difficult is our responsibility to treat with loving kindness those with whom we differ. Peggy Noonan notes in The Wall Street Journal that social media has reduced discussion to “snotty potshots.”  James Bowman writing in The New Criterion points out that “anyone can be angry, but it takes effort to think.”

We owe each other at least an effort to think beyond potshots.

Wiliam Penn puts it in perspective. “I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.”

Laura Cummings has written a newly published book about Velazquez and the power of his painting.

She writes in The Guardian about how Las Meninas affected her, and led her to write a book of praise about Velazquez. Here are the best parts:

“The painting I saw that day seems to hold death back from the brink, even as it acknowledges our shared human fate. It shows the past in all its mortal beauty, but it also looks forward into the flowing future. Because of Velázquez, these long-lost people will always be waiting for us in the Prado; they will never go away, as long as we hold them in sight. Las Meninas is like a chamber of the mind, a place where the dead will never die.”

“To respect these portraits is to respect these people. And this depth is not an illusion. The mystery of Velázquez’s art is not just that his paintings are both dazzling and profoundly moving all at once, but that these apparent opposites coincide to the extent that one feels neither can exist without the other. The truth of life, of our brief walk in the sun, has to be set down in a flash of brilliant brush strokes that are almost disappearing. The image, the person, the life: all are here now but on the edge of dissolution. It is the definition of our human existence.”

What I like best here are these thoughts about portraits and those they portray:

“They will never go away, as long as we hold them in sight.”

“The truth of life, of our brief walk in the sun, has to be set down in a flash of brilliant brush strokes that are almost disappearing.”

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jan/03/velazquez-vanishing-man-laura-cumming-john-snare